To the Political-Chairs list: The Sierra Club Board election may receive
some national media attention this year, and the attention could
indirectly affect the Club's political program in some areas of the
country. The story below was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times
for Sunday, January 18. I thought you should be aware of it in case
there are any local follow-up inquiries to any of you.
--Dan Sullivan, SCPC Communications Comm Chair

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sierra18jan18,1,7295202.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Election Becomes a Fight Over Sierra Club's Future

Animal-rights activists and anti-immigration
advocates are teaming in a bid to control the
board, to the dismay of traditionalists.

By Miguel Bustillo and Kenneth R. Weiss
Times Staff Writers

January 18, 2004

An unusual alliance of anti-immigration advocates
and animal-rights activists is attempting to take
over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's
oldest national environmental group, in what is
emerging as a bitter fight over the future of the
112-year-old organization founded by Scottish
immigrant John Muir.

Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the
club to take a stand against immigration in 1998
are seeking to win majority control of the
group's 15-member governing board in a spring
election - this time, as part of a broader
coalition that includes vegetarians, who want the
club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising
animals for human consumption.

In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents
have written a letter expressing "extreme concern
for the continuing viability of the club,"
protesting what they see as a concerted effort by
outside organizations to hijack the mainstream
conservationist group and its $95-million annual
budget.

Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the
five available seats on the governing board only
recently joined the Sierra Club. If they win,
they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members
will vote in the board elections in March, with
the results tallied in April. People who join the
club by the end of January should be able to vote.

The election has attracted the interest of
anti-immigration groups, which are encouraging
their members to join the club to help elect the
insurgent candidates.

"What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that
external organizations would attempt to interfere
and manipulate our election to advance their own
agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra Club
president.

Moreover, club officials argue that members of
the two insurgent groups share fundamentally
anti-human views, in their opposition to
immigration and in their belief that people
should take a backseat to other species.

The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been
to protect nature for people," said Executive
Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up the
gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a
strand of misanthropy that says human beings are
a problem."

Pope noted that 18% of Sierra Club members like
to fish or hunt, and he worried they could be
driven out by the new agenda from animal-rights
advocates. "It's important to have hunters and
fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are
a big-tent organization. We want the Sierra Club
to be a comfortable place for Americans who want
clean air, clean water, and to protect America's
open spaces."

The list of insurgent candidates features some
high-profile names, including former Colorado
Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University entomology
professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris,
former director of the Congressional Black Caucus
Foundation. All three have been outspoken
advocates of controlling population growth or
restricting immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The
Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of
America."

Club officials say the campaign got underway
quietly with the recent election of three
activists, including UCLA astronomy professor
Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs
on immigration; and Paul Watson, head of the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine
environmental group perhaps best-known for
ramming whaling ships. During their campaigns,
the candidates downplayed the views they are now
advancing.

Club members who support the insurgent candidates
accused the organization's old guard of trying to
demonize them as radicals to head off the
increasingly popular efforts to win a new
majority.

"I really think we ought to be judged on our
merits and what we've done in the past, and not
divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said.

Political squabbles are hardly new to the
750,000-member Sierra Club, whose members squared
off just last year over whether to take a stand
against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over
this spring's elections is becoming especially
rancorous.

Some longtime Sierrans worry that a takeover by
the insurgents would brand the organization as
bigoted and xenophobic.

"I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are
racists," Pope said. "But they are clearly being
supported by racists."

Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous.
They argue that the club has a responsibility to
take strong positions on the issues affecting the
health of the planet.

"Everything else the Sierra Club is doing is
doomed to fail if the United States continues on
its rapid population growth," said Zuckerman, 50,
who was the leading vote-getter in the Sierra
Club board election two years ago.

"There are people who are being born today who
will see a California that has more people than
the entire United States when I was born," he
said.

Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb
population growth, Zuckerman said the group must
"talk about the numbers - how much immigration we
should have and how many babies - so the mix of
fertility and immigration is debated and we can
come to a level where the population will
stabilize."

Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but
who broke ranks with that organization because he
advocated more aggressive tactics, said he did
not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the
confrontational methods of Sea Shepherd.

But the club, he said, should promote eating
habits that protect Earth's other inhabitants.

"Human beings are literally stealing resources
from all the other species on this planet," said
Watson, a Canadian immigrant.

In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11
former presidents, Watson wrote, "Is the
advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a cause
for concern? I guess it is if you have a vested
interest in grazing or the beef or poultry
industry. I fail to see how vegetarianism in the
age of Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish,
etc., can be considered anything but practical
and realistic."

Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other
prior presidents have pointed out that the club's
members already voted to remain neutral on
immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public
debate, and said that revisiting the divisive
dispute would detract from what board members
have agreed is the most immediate action needed
to protect the environment: unseating President
Bush.

The presence of the anti-immigration candidates
has led civil rights leader Morris Dees of the
Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks what it
considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club
and run for its board. Dees said he decided to
throw his hat into the ring to generate publicity
after his staff found that anti-immigration
groups were urging members to join the Sierra
Club and help swing the vote.

"I'm not running to win a seat on the board,"
Dees said. "I'm running to sound the alarm of an
attempt to take over this organization by the
radical element of anti-immigration people. They
are interested in keeping this country white."

Earlier this month, VDare.com, an
anti-immigration website founded by former Forbes
senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book
"Alien Nation," ran an article discussing the
Sierra Club elections. The article referred to
Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged
immigration-control activists to join the Sierra
Club and vote for like-minded candidates in its
upcoming elections.

The article in turn was picked up by an
anti-Semitic website and topped with a
homophobic, anti-Semitic headline. The author of
the article, Brenda Walker, said she was dismayed
at that, but Sierra Club officials cited the
recycled article as evidence of extremist support
for the anti-immigration candidates.

Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara
historian who has tracked the environmental
movement, noted that since its early days, the
Sierra Club has struggled with tensions over
humanity's imprint on the environment.

Gentlemen hikers and climbers - who wanted to
preserve America's beautiful places so the
privileged could visit them - wrote diatribes in
the early 20th century about Anglo Americans
being overrun by unsavory immigrants from
Southern and Eastern Europe, he said.

Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been
the target of a supposed takeover. In the late
1970s, when the club was embroiled in a battle
with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort
in Mineral King near Sequoia, the ski industry
ran a slate of candidates to push for support of
more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates
lost.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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